SAN FRANCISCO, 22 JANUARY 2008- Around the
2004 election, I received a lot of emails from my parents'
Republican friends asking me if I'd forgotten the events of
September 11, 2001. I can understand. I am more than usually
absent-minded. But at the time, it seemed like no one could
really "forget" 9/11. It was a date burned in our memories, the
time that Americans realized that international conflicts could
actually cross oceans onto our borders. I wondered: could we
ever forget? And how long would it take? I set my cultural
clock. But my guess was that it would take a good ten years.

I was wrong. The stopwatch officially clicked this Christmas
with the release of Charlie Wilson's War. A
lighthearted romp about the covert operations in Afghanistan
that led to the rise of the Taliban; a heroic story that can't
quite find it within itself to imagine that the pure hearted
American desire to kick some commie ass could ever
lead to anything bad, Charlie Wilson is as
embarrassingly bad as Tom Hanks' Texas accent and Julia
Roberts' hair. I found myself ashamed that I had paid $10 to
see such an awful movie. But I was even more ashamed when my
parents - they of the 9/11 emails - saw the movie and
laughed.

To be sure, the movie takes pains to let us know that it knows
that the story in Afghanistan continues, and that it's not all
belly dancers and secretaries in low-cut blouses. But a few
asides here and there can't stop the dominant thrust of the
plot, which wants to make Wilson into an antiauthoritarian
hero. The men in suits at the Defense Department and CIA, it
seems, don't think it's worth risking American lives and
treasure in Afghanistan. They'd rather let the Russians spend
their money on a slender prize while we keep ours for a real
conflict. They're planners - which in American movie parlance
means that they're a bunch of wimps and ivy-league
stuffed-shirts. Wilson knows better. Out of an alcoholic haze -
the movie can't quite decide whether or not this damages his
judgment - Wilson can see something more: he wants to
WIN. On the way back from Afghanistan he tells his
aide the heartwarming story of his entry into politics:
Wilson's dog had been digging up the local congressman's flower
beds, so the congressman killed Wilson's dog. Not good
politics, to be sure. Still, Wilson was so incensed that he not
only digs up the congressman's flowerbeds, but drives black
voters to the polls in the next election, telling them, as they
get out of the car, that the congressman shot his dog. Keep it
in mind, world. No injury is too slight for catastrophic
retaliation. Nobody messes with us.

I'm afraid that's the way things are going in politics these
days. The problem in Iraq is no longer that we attacked a
nation that was no real threat to us when we should have
directed our fire at the one that was. That would require
smarts, and smarts, we all know, are for wimps. The problem is
that we didn't kick enough ass to begin with - in fact, if we
really get into it, it's because that bureaucrat
Rumsfeld wouldn't let the generals kick some Iraqi
ass, as they dearly wanted to do. Meanwhile, the American
people are happily watching cute little Afghanis in turbans as
they learn to shoot stinger missiles in the movies - "Look, Ma!
They're dancing!" - never minding that in a couple of
years, the bodies falling from the skies will be us.

Melynda Nuss is a writer and an Assistant Professor of
Romantic Literature and Drama at the University of Texas - Pan
American. She last wrote on No Country For Old
Men for Culturekiosque.com